The victims are women from South Los Angeles who died in the late 80s and early 90s, LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne told the Weekly.

"They're the most similar" of the unsolved homicides the department has reviewed in connection with the case, he said. " ... The way they were found, the ages, they were almost rubber stamped" with the killer's M.O.

Authorities made the possible connections known at a Wednesday night meeting at Bethel AME Church in South L.A. not far from the home of Grim Sleeper suspect Lonnie Franklin Jr., who's been charged with the murders of 10 women who died from 1985 to 2007.

The two homicides were not found through a batch of 180 photos police said they took from Franklin's house. Those pictures were released to the media to determine if any of the women in them were possible Grim Sleeper victims. So far police ruled out 72 women and established four missing persons cases as a result of the images.

But with the two homicides cops are now looking at, Kilcoyne said those "cases were known about for some time" and were developed during reviews of possible Grim Sleeper connections over the last three and a half years.

Added: The Los Angeles Times notes that the time period of the homicides could fill in a part of the large gap in killings related to the Grim Sleeper cases in the 1990s. The Weekly gave the case the Grim Sleeper title as a result of that gap, but the Times now says detectives are questioning if the Sleeper suspect ever indeed "slept."